Clive James on this week's TV, including Queen Victoria’s Children,
Climbed Every Mountain, Borgen and Africa.

One of my favourite movies, Random Hearts, screened by Channel 5, was punctuated by buzzing swarms of commercials, whose cumulative effect was to persuade me that my brain had been corroded by television.

Another reason to lose control of one’s mind would have been the large amount of airtime devoted to Queen Victoria. Luckily most of the stuff was good. Two of the best movies about her were on. In Mrs Brown (BBC One), the older, supposedly sagacious Victoria, played by Judi Dench, might or might not have developed a tender passion for Billy Connolly. As Mr Brown, he was wild-eyed but winning.

In the equally excellent film The Young Victoria (BBC Two), Rupert Friend as Prince Albert was neither wild-eyed nor, in my view, especially winning. But he pleased Victoria, played by the marvellous Emily Blunt. Pleased her? She was crazy for him. She never forgot her royal status, but at one touch from him she forgot everything else. Their grand passion was made very believable.

For the filmmakers, it must have been a big help that the story was true. The thing going on between Victoria and Albert was actually like that. Proof was offered in a set of documentaries called Queen Victoria’s Children (BBC Two). During the short time that Albert remained alive, nine infants were generated, but we were given plenty of expert testimony to persuade us that Victoria didn’t care so much for the business of having children.

What she liked best was the process that brought the children into being. Later on, each of them became yet another limiting factor on the total time that she and Albert could spend in the sack. It might sound insensitive to talk in those terms, but the real insensitivity was all Victoria’s. Her knack for disguising self-indulgence as a sense of duty made her the worst mother you could imagine.

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She was especially hellish to her eldest son, Bertie, who eventually, after her endless reign finally closed, became the kind of genuinely beloved monarch that she never had been. She was worshipped worldwide by many millions of people, but always as an image.

Sometimes the image can go on fooling the world forever. As played by Julie Andrews in the movie The Sound of Music (BBC One), Maria von Trapp was an enchanted soul simply born to form young people into a singing group and then hide them from the Nazis. As revealed in the documentary Climbed Every Mountain (BBC Two), Maria had queenly propensities. The show’s hostess, Sue Perkins, went “in search” of the real Maria and uncovered a dingbat.

Maria deserves credit for getting the kids to safety in America, but thereafter she kept them on the road for years, demanding from them a military dedication to match her own. Clearly they disliked her deeply. Meanwhile Salzburg, the city of their origin, was busy disliking the musical industry that had grown out of Maria’s memoirs. Not until very recently did Salzburg permit a staging of the show, which had previously run for years on end in places like Finland.

Our Sue made a meal out of the question of why Salzburg had been so slow on the uptake. She looked good in a dirndl but the price of wearing it was a tendency to coddle the locals. She could have been less tentative with the truth, which is that the Austrians would rather not hear about any aspect of the past that had Nazis in it. This is because almost all Austrians once thought that Hitler was wonderful.

The recent Salzburg premiere of the stage show of The Sound of Music, the immediate pretext for Sue’s programme, had actors dressed as stormtroopers guarding the doorways. But Sue was surely too quick to greet this as a sign of a new, humble acknowledgment of past realities. It was more likely a case of cashing in on the Nazis’ sinister glamour while declining to consider what it had once all meant. At least Maria had realised that the only way to solve a problem like Hitler was to get out if you could.

As magisterial women went, the true queen of all intelligent hearts was back on view when a new season of the Danish political serial Borgen opened on BBC Four. The first episode began with Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg visiting Afghanistan, from which she contemplated withdrawing the Danish troops. But later in the show an Iraqi female refugee persuaded her that the Taliban should be fought whatever it took.

All the political arguments were well laid out but the show wouldn’t work if the leading actress, Sidse Babett Knudsen, were less charming. Saying this, however, is a sin against feminism only if you think that Birgitte should have been kept in her place. To put it another way, her place is quite clearly at the top.

And it’s not as if everyone automatically obeys her. Journalists and politicos are plotting against her full-time. Her personal life falls apart. Sometimes she isn’t even very nice. But she always, finally, does the decent thing. A true role model and heroine, one would have thought.

But what if a woman is gifted yet can’t assert herself? Before Christmas, in my week off, I still watched everything, but somehow I missed Loving Miss Hatto (BBC One), the play by Victoria Wood about the pianist who should have been great but was defeated by stage fright. Later in life her doting husband engineered her comeback as a recording artist by taking other people’s performances and doctoring them to sound like her. Through miracles of technology I got hold of the show and found it entirely brilliant. You have to remember, when a prodigy such as Miranda comes diving into frame, that Victoria is still the queen.

Featuring the actual David Attenborough only at the start and finish, but decorated throughout by his voice, the first instalment of Africa (BBC One) had black rhinos and giraffes. The black rhinos accumulated in some numbers at the waterhole by dead of night, and there they socialized. They rubbed noses tenderly, despite the looming presence of their horns: a piercing challenge to every poacher in the world.

But the true star of the show was an old giraffe in the Kalahari who found himself a potential mate just before a younger male showed up. The fight between the two males was beyond belief. They whacked each other with their necks with terrific force. Finally the young male went down for the count and the older, wiser male got off with the girl. It’s nature’s way.